“And not enough eros,” Freud said quickly.
“Precisely. You are following the rationality of Apollo and ignoring the sensuality of Dionysus. You are saying it is Oedipus or nothing, either or. It is childhood drives or nothing.”
“You will have to explain.”
“Look,” Wheeler said after a pause. “Don’t you see what you are doing? You are introducing introspection to an age when people don’t do much self-examination. This is the rising connectedness to complement the overly masculine dissections that science has brought with it over the past few centuries. This is the rise of the mythic feminine, the connection of all things.”
Freud looked genuinely curious for just a moment. “The ‘mythic feminine, ’ ” he repeated, liking the sound of it. “Yes. The connectedness to all things,” he concluded.
“But why stop short?”
Freud shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “You suggest something different? ” he said curtly.
“Why not take another myth now and expand that? Then take many myths. You are being as narrow as the monotheists you criticize. You have broken into the secret temple, but you are not using its full power.”
“What other myth do you recommend?”
“Well, why not Orpheus, for instance? The musician responsible for playing the sun up every morning, who loses his lover, Eurydice, to the god of the underworld, separated from his feminine nature, if you will. He is given permission to retrieve her only to lose her forever because of breaking the rules and looking back at her.”
“I know my Greek mythology, Herr Burden,” Freud said, barely hiding his indignation.
“But the ending. Do you know that in the end Orpheus is attacked by the rageful women of Thrace who are jealous of his attentions, and he is torn apart and thrown into the river?”
Now Freud smiled, following the argument in spite of himself. “Are you saying I should be torn apart by angry women?”
“It will be suggested, believe me.” Wheeler paused for effect.
“I do not see how this myth relates to hysteria.”
Wheeler didn’t even skip a beat. “Stories are the unconscious. That’s what you are saying.”
“What, pray tell, does that say about the roots of hysteria?”
Wheeler was wound up now. There was no stopping. “This story tells the plight of the bifurcated character. The split is what is killing your patients. They need to unite the two parts of their natures, the logos and eros, if you will. We all have the split, but in their cases the split is debilitating. Orpheus represents both Apollo and Dionysus, both logos and eros. We are separated from our true nature, and unless we are brought together by physical immersion in real life, we will stay fragmented forever.”
Freud suddenly held his guest in his gaze for a long moment. “Very interesting,” he said, then paused, collecting himself. “Thank you for the mythology lesson,” he said curtly. “But I will stick to my Oedipus analogy, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course, that is your prerogative. I am just saying that I think it is too narrow, unworthy of the grandeur of your work.”
“I think you miss my point, Herr Burden.” Freud was now glaring at his visitor.
“I think you miss mine.”
“I think—” Freud paused, as if reconsidering his response, aware that he had been on a dangerous precipice, right on the edge of believing his patient’s grandiose story. “Herr Burden,” he began slowly, pulling himself back to solid ground, becoming absolutely serious. “I know you believe that you are here to dissuade me from moving away from what you call my ‘seduction theory’ to Oedipus. I appreciate the passion and conviction with which you have pursued your argument. But what you do not see, and perhaps never will see, is that in sharing your ornate and elaborate story, in sharing so openly your journal, you have strengthened, not diminished my conviction.”
The compulsive conversationalist found himself suddenly silenced. “Wait,” Wheeler said. “You think my story strengthens your belief?”
“I do.”
“You think that I have concocted this whole fantastic story because I am feeling guilty that I have killed my father to have my mother to myself? ” The words had erupted from him out of exasperation and now sat unavoidably before them. Neither man spoke.
The great doctor shrugged, as if to acknowledge the painful and unspoken truth. “The unexamined life, Herr Burden,” he said deliberately. “Neither of us has much use or respect for it.”
Wheeler shook his head. “I think we have so much more to talk about.”
Sigmund Freud stopped him with a movement of his hand. “I think we will call an end to this meeting. We will not need to meet again.” Abruptly rising and turning his back to Wheeler, he moved quickly toward the door. “I am sure you can find your way out.” As Sigmund Freud left the room, Wheeler was aware once again what a short man his host was.
44
Out of the Dark Corners
Why do I tell you all my secrets?” Weezie said. She was sitting with her legs under her on the shelf in front of the large open window looking out onto the Stephans-Platz. She was wearing a white lace blouse only partially buttoned, with her hair up, the way it had been the night of the opera. “It is as if you are my confessor.” Then she smiled and looked back at where Wheeler was sitting in an overstuffed chair, admiring her effect in the morning light. “I should be confessing about the spell our conversations have cast on me. I am totally bewitched.”
“Have you never talked this way to anyone before?”
“My friends and I have always been very proper. There were always girls who talked about such things—” She wrinkled her nose in adolescent distaste. “But they were of questionable repute.”
“Did you never talk with a young man?”
Weezie recoiled. “Oh, heavens no. One would rather die on the spot than talk to a young man about secret things.”
“So you just hold it inside?”
“That is just what one does.”
“And what is the result?”
She looked back out the window. “One should not go around talking about feelings. It just is not considerate.” She paused. “On the other hand, it does seem to make things better to get them out of the dark corners.” She looked back at Wheeler and smiled again. “You see, that is what you have done to me. You have caused me to bring all manner of unmentionables up into the daylight. Shameful. Once they are there, they don’t seem to be as important or worth hiding anymore.” She readjusted her legs under her. “The strict Puritan voice inside me is losing out to the sybarite, I fear. And all because of you.”
“Aren’t the two voices giving in to a third?”
She looked at him quizzically for a moment, to be certain he wasn’t teasing. “I do not follow,” she said.
“You said before that you were inhabited by three people. I’m just saying that your aunt Prudence and your willful child have perhaps stopped warring with each other and have given way to that third self you described. Do you remember how you described it?”
“My mother,” she said pensively.
“Exactly. The Puritan part of you—” Wheeler raised his hand to the top of an imaginary diagram in front of him. He moved his hand down to the bottom. “The libertine part—” He moved his hand to the middle position. “And the middle voice, the mature moderator, the authentic one. Strict parent, mature adult, impulsive child: three voices in all of us, actually, and we should try to use the middle one.”
“The mature voice I would like to hear always but often cannot.”
Wheeler nodded and smiled. “The mature voice, right. And whose voice is it?”
“My mother’s.”
Wheeler said nothing, only looked at her expectantly. At first, noting his expectation, she looked perplexed, as if unable to guess what should be coming next. Then she closed her eyes and smiled. “Not my mother, actually. My mother’s gift to me, the one I have had such a hard time reaching.”
“And what is that voice?” Wheeler said softly.
“That third voice, that mature one, the one I want to use. It is not my aunt Prudence with all her shoulds and will nots, and it is not my willful child with its selfish gratifications. It is just the one real and true voice.”
“The authentic one,” Wheeler said.
“What a curious way to describe it,” she said. “That is precisely it: my authentic voice,” Weezie said. “And how I wish to use it all the time.”
“You’re not alone in that wish.”
“But I seem so far behind. So often I feel afraid. I hear that Puritanical voice, and I feel unworthy and afraid. I want so to move beyond.”
Wheeler smiled. “And you do that by opening up and talking.”
Weezie fell silent and thought for a moment. “I need to open up more. I know that. I would have told no one, absolutely no one, about my meeting with Herr Mahler. And I would have hoped that no one had found out. I was so embarrassed that I would cringe inside every time I thought of it. Now, I have mentioned it enough times that it seems commonplace. ” She smiled. “What every young girl does, you know: faint in the presence of a great master.”
“And you begin to see connections.”
“That is the confounding part. I have felt that way before—flushed and dizzy. In college, when the girls would talk about uncomfortable things, and they would take delight in looking at me to see how I was reacting, I felt terrible pressure and would feel faint.”
Wheeler was amused. “What kinds of things?”
She looked away. “You know, the things girls in college talk about when they are trying to rattle someone they think naïve and sheltered.”
“What kind of things?”
She began to flush. “You know! I know you know.”
“I have never been a college girl,” he said with a gentle laugh. “You’ll have to tell me.”
“The things that make one blush and faint.”
“About what? Radical politics? Women’s right to vote? Garish interior design? Going without a bath?”
“No,” she said impatiently, “other things—”
“What sorts of things?” Wheeler was boring in, not letting her off the hook.
“You know,” she said, now sounding peeved.
“I don’t know.”
She balked, but then said finally, “Things sexual.”
“And why do they make one blush and faint?”
She looked back out the window, and her perturbation fell away suddenly and she became rapt in deep thought, then turned back slowly. “I do not know,” she said with great earnestness. “I have never given it any thought.”
“And was that what made you faint with Herr Mahler?”
Again, she looked pensive and took a long time to answer. “How curious, ” she said absently. “I had never thought of it that way.”
On certain afternoons when Wheeler knew Dilly would not be there, he brought Weezie to lunch with Kleist’s friends at the Café Central. They were more than gracious to her and seemed to like the way she held her own in a discussion of art or even politics. Of course, she had few equals on the subject of music, and her reputation on that subject preceded her because of her already-established association with the music crowd. “They think I am your sweet girl,” she said after one such lunch.
“They don’t mean it disrespectfully,” Wheeler said.
“I think it would be better if we were not seen together in public,” she said, “now that we have this new—” She paused, having trouble with the word. “—this new arrangement.”
“You are worried about how you are being perceived.”
“I know that proper girls, the ones these young Viennese will eventually marry, do not join them in artist’s studios for trysts. That role is saved for their shop girls and promiscuous workers’ daughters.”
“That is the old order,” Wheeler said, “for sure. But now there are modern women.” He would have told her of Alma Schindler, the well-born and ravishingly beautiful painter’s daughter who had numerous affairs before marrying Gustav Mahler, then Walter Gropius, the world-renowned architect, and then finally the writer Franz Werfel, who wrote The Song of Bernadette, but in 1897 she was only eighteen years old and still unknown. “I think that young artists in Vienna are the perfect people to understand such ‘arrangements,’ ” he said, just a little defensively.
“It is not only that. I have the feeling I am being watched. There is a young man who keeps his eye on me from a distance, and it makes me feel uneasy, as if he is a spy from back home.” She became quiet, lost for a moment in the enormity of what she had committed to with Wheeler. “However, I shall miss very stimulating company,” she said finally. “My friends at home talk about frivolities. Your friends in Vienna talk about matters of substance.”
“Like the end of the world.”
“Well, some of it is a little gloomy,” she said with a smile. “I don’t know why they do not have more hope for the future of everything. My frivolous friends think that Boston will be there, just as it is now, forever. These people give the impression that they really think Vienna is about to collapse on itself. But it is stimulating, nonetheless.”
It was late in the afternoon when she returned to the studio. Wheeler was waiting for her with an anxious smile. “I have a surprise,” he said. “Look in the corner, over there.” He pointed behind one of the brightly colored canvases.
She walked over and saw two instrument cases leaning against the wall. “A cello,” she said with a burst of unrestrained joy, opening the larger of the two cases.
Wheeler opened the other and pulled out a classical guitar. “I found a wonderful old music shop, and the proprietor loaned me all this, plus some music.”
Wheeler brought chairs from the sitting room, and arranged them. Weezie sat and straddled the cello, running the bow across the strings and producing a few tentative sounds. “I am very rusty,” she said.
Wheeler fashioned a music stand out of a wooden easel and propped onto it a piece of sheet music.
“Oh my,” Weezie said. “We are going to be serious about this.” She put her cello aside and walked over to her handbag, opened it, and withdrew a small packet, which she unwrapped and revealed a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. She came back to her seat and put them on. “I’m lost without these, not very ladylike,” she said, repositioning the cello.
“It’s Haydn,” he said, “written for cello and violin. It’s not quite my style, but I figured I could improvise.”
“To improvise,” she said with a sigh. “You are not afraid to do that. Me, I am stuck in following the rules. For me, playing music is sticking rigidly to the prescribed pattern, sticking with the traditions.”
“Perhaps we can change that a bit,” Wheeler said and began playing the notes as written on the page.
Faltering and hesitant in the beginning, both musicians slowly began to reach into their pasts and find that magical flow of the music and of what the other was doing with it. The deep rich tones of the cello slid under and around the fine finger-picking counterpoint of the classical guitar. Both Weezie and Wheeler let themselves travel with the music until they were lost together, far from Vienna or 1897, somewhere out with the stars. At one point, in the middle of their inspired collaboration, Wheeler looked over at Weezie and saw on her face an expression he would later describe as “dreamy ecstasy.”
“Will you play me something from San Francisco?” Weezie said, and with the guitar still in his lap Wheeler began the opening chords of the same melody they had been playing. And then he began singing the song that had had its origins in that blizzardy winter night in January 1959, when Wheeler played music with his idol Buddy Holly, and then had run around and around in his head over the years, until that night in 1975 when he came forward with his father’s old Martin guitar alone on the stage at the football stadium in Berkeley, California, when it became the legendary “Coming Together,” the best-known song of t
he era.
He had actually sung it one time before the Berkeley concert, to an audience of one, at the bedside of Joan Quigley, the last time he saw her. She smiled a contented soulful smile. “That’s beautiful,” she said in little more than a sigh and with no trace of her patented sharpness. “Will you sing that for me, when this is all over?”
“Just one time for the world,” Wheeler said, his eyes filled with tears. “Then I’ll retire it forever.”
“One and out?” she said, with barely enough energy to smile.
“One and out,” he said. “This time for you.”
With what little she had left, Joan Quigley laughed. “That is so you,” she said, back to her old self.
And now for just the third time in front of an audience, another audience of one, Wheeler Burden was playing the song “Coming Together” that had become a legend, in retrospect his signature piece. Weezie Putnam, leaning on her rented cello, watched him in amazement. “That is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard,” she said dreamily, lost in the moment of this first lesson in improvisation.
45
Worse Than You Know
You’ve been following her, haven’t you?” Wheeler said abruptly, on the train ride back from Lambach. "Who’s that?” Dilly said it quickly, betrayed by a twinge of embarrassment, knowing exactly who.
"I knew it.”
“Well, I did find her,” Dilly said. “And I will admit to standing and watching her a few times.”
“Staring? Enough so that she would notice.”
“Well, I guess maybe,” Dilly said, now looking uncomfortable.
“And I thought you were the one who said we had to be scrupulously careful.”
“I didn’t speak to her,” he said, defending himself. “Or approach her.”
“But she noticed you.”
“I guess so. She is so darned attractive. I can’t keep from watching her.”
“Well, you’d better,” Wheeler said without humor. “Or you’ll blow the whole deal.”
Earlier, he had joined Dilly in his small, poorly lighted, and unheated apartment by the canal off Rudolfs-Platz. Wheeler met him there early because Dilly was planning a train trip up the Danube and said that it would mean a great deal to him if Wheeler would come along. When he entered, he found Dilly surrounded by papers on his small unlighted desk. “What is all this?” Wheeler said.
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